My cousin\u2019s getting married in Chicago.\u00a0 Game on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I have five cousins in Chicago, along with a host of family and friends and kinfolk and people to whom I am distantly related but can no longer quite remember how, nor even in some cases why, but regardless they\u2019re family, and when family gets married, you show up if you can.\u00a0 Mostly because they\u2019ll feed you.\u00a0 Also, weddings are like funerals, in that if you don\u2019t go to other peoples\u2019 weddings, they won\u2019t come to yours.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since all the family came to ours, we try to go when these things come up \u2013 which, with my cousins, seems to be an annual event.\u00a0 Last year, my cousin got married in Chicago.\u00a0 This year, my cousin got married in Chicago.\u00a0 Next year, to the surprise of no one at all, my cousin is getting married in Chicago.\u00a0 After that, I\u2019m out of unmarried cousins in Chicago.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what we\u2019ll do.<\/p>\n
So, once again lured by the open road and the promise of watching young love and the start of matrimonial bliss, we succumbed to our yuppie nature, loaded up the minivan, and headed West.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A brief interlude to discuss the weather in this narrative:\u00a0 The weather was uniformly fine, barring a torrential storm that we weathered in the comfort and safety of our friends Myke and Marcy\u2019s house in Chicago.\u00a0 While there were a few clouds, they seemed embarrassed to be there, trying to hide behind one another when you looked at them.\u00a0 For the purposes of our driving descriptions, you should feel free to fill in whatever weather you prefer – the skies were timid, turgid, brutal, beautiful, heavy, heavenly.\u00a0 Have them as you will, I’m not writing about them further – though I’ll try to remind you where to fill them in, for those of you who require a little climate control in your narrative.<\/em><\/p>\n Heading out Wednesday morning, we packed bad movies, good medicine, great juju, and heavy mojo into the minichariot and wove our way westward, traveling through a webbed tent of tent caterpillars up Routes 70 and 68 en route to Columbus, Ohio.\u00a0 The tent caterpillars are everywhere.\u00a0 Someone needs to decide they\u2019re the next trendy food group, so we can feed them to wealthy New Yorkers and kill them off before they eat all of western Maryland.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of protein out there on the road \u2013 you can tell because the McBugs keep hitting the windshield.\u00a0 You can tell the McBugs from the other kinds because when you use the windshield washer fluid, they still leave a huge greasy smear all over \u2013 too much fried food in their diet.<\/p>\n We were headed to Columbus to see my sister Brenda and the lovely Dar as well as the newly married Courtney and Nic, since Columbus is mostly on the way to Chicago and it\u2019s good to see people.\u00a0 I spent some of the drive explaining to the three lunatic children that this was a trip to meet new family \u2013 and family is who we say they are.\u00a0 Brenda is my older sister not through any chance of biology but because we decided it was so.\u00a0 Courtney and Nic, just back from their honeymoon, decided to become family recently as well \u2013 weddings all over the place.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a perspective you get while driving cross country that you miss in the air.\u00a0 It introduces the kids to the American family \u2013 good, bad, and ugly, all part of our American heritage.\u00a0 The family of the road, perhaps.\u00a0<\/p>\n Moving over the Appalachians and Alleghenies, the continental plates crumple the landscape like an accordioned auto in those car crash movies they show to scare you in driver’s ed.\u00a0 The land gets gradually more folded until you realize that the long flat stretch of highway is actually a mountain road and you\u2019re checking your brakes and eyeing the runaway truck ramps.\u00a0 It was that last one that intrigued me \u2013 I don\u2019t expect, and you can call me a fatheaded flatlander, but I just don\u2019t expect to find a phenomenal crepe joint in Wheeling.\u00a0 It was phenomenal.\u00a0 They have a list of crepes as long as your arm, and they boast that many of the ingredients are purchased or harvested daily.\u00a0 I believe them.\u00a0 Now I\u2019m the last one to admit I didn\u2019t expect high-end crepes in the middle of Wheeling, or if not absolutely the last one, I admitted it as recently as just right there.\u00a0 I was surprised; my flabbers were gasted.\u00a0 This place is crepe-tastic, and you must go if you\u2019re within hailing distance of Wheeling. \u00a0\u00a0I had a savory pesto mushroom something with chicken crepe that would have made a less sober man weep.\u00a0 (Alas, I was driving, or I might have wept.)\u00a0\u00a0Plus they had decent music; they were playing Katy Perry\u2019s Last Friday Night.\u00a0 If you\u2019re ever within shooting distance of Wheeling, stop in at the Later Gator.\u00a0 Or you\u2019ll both starve.\u00a0 But all good things must end, including lunch, and we pressed on.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We left the Later Gator in Wheeling, West Virginia, and crossed into Ohio.\u00a0 Drive for long enough and it starts to seem that you\u2019re holding perfectly still, and the world is simply rotating under your wheels as you remain in place.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nature's Panoply of Paintbrushes<\/p><\/div>\n As I pressed down on the gas, the road moved underneath me to show off more and more and then more again of the colors of summer, greens and shades of greens and dusky brown earth tones and bright blue cornflowers and tiny fields of grasses in the medians of the highways that by themselves are simply grass, but together with a thousand others like themselves cause the strip to wave with a deep pink that looks airbrushed on the field.\u00a0 There were birds, there were bees, there were flowers and trees, and there were more McBugs on my windshield than a hurricane could wash off.\u00a0 We turned on the radio to Katy Parry singing about Last Friday Night and let the miles slip away, making for the outskirts of Columbus and a whirlwind tour of the suburbs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having less than 16 hours to enjoy the company of two sets of dear friends, we introduced them all to each other by meeting for dinner at BJ\u2019s Brewery<\/a>, where I sat next to a nutty brunette who drank Nutty Brewnette.\u00a0 I tried one and let the Human Tape Recorder try some; she liked it more than I did.\u00a0 They have a Porter that has some good things going for it, and the food was good, but I didn\u2019t notice most of this because the conversation was so lively and fun that 2 hours or more went by in only a few short minutes.\u00a0 Time does fly when you\u2019re having fun, and it flies even faster when you\u2019re having dinner with good friends and new family.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thursday dawned too soon, and I mean that literally since Number One Son woke me up before 0600.\u00a0 We said our fond farewells to Dar and headed out for a brief if cardiac-inducing breakfast with Brenda, and once again hit the open road.\u00a0 The weather was just like\u00a0you imagine it to have been.<\/p>\n
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\nIn the middle of one of those thousands of accordion folds, in a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia, we found lunch at the Later Gator<\/a>.\u00a0 They seem to have three mottos:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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